Search This Blog

Posts

Something remarkable happened last night at Direct Action Everywhere Mass Connecticut's Day of Action. As we stood holding candles outside Chipotle sharing words about the horrors that happen to animals of other species, a man stepped out of the passing crowd and came up to me. "I love animals. Where do I have to sign?" he asked. Our chapter member Joe and I were confused before realizing he thought we were asking for a petition.

"No, nothing to sign, but you can join in," we told him as Lauri handed him a candle.

"I'm homeless," he told me, "got kicked out of my parents' house and lost my dog. I love animals. it's horrible what we do to them. I want to stand with you." I felt and could sense others' discomfort given the stereotypes and toxic prejudices our society teaches us about homeless people. He stayed with us as we rounded the corner to stand outside a Buffalo Wild Wings. Tiffany, Lauri, and Joe all said a few words as p…

This has been said, and better, by Rob Wiblin and others, but I'm restating it here to draw attention to its implications. Many criticisms of effective altruism (even the excellent ones in this Boston Review forum) go like this: 1) X is important (or Y is unimportant). 2) Effective altruism ignores X (or gives undue weight to Y). 3) Therefore, effective altruism is flawed. If the goal is to criticize the fundamental idea of EA, then I think these criticisms miss the mark. If (1) is really true, then all that implies is that EA should focus on X. If the goal is to criticize the EA community, then these criticisms are more on point, though there's a question of whether a community is defined by what its members do or by the fundamental ideas that unite them. But similar points have been made by others, so I'd like to focus on two reasons why the framing of these criticisms matters. 1) If they consciously adopted the role of internal critics to EA, those in favor of institutional r…

The non-profit environmental magazine Grist is doing a month-long feature on the future of meat. Monday's piece considers the morality of meat. There's not nearly the same sort of sophistry in the piece I've come to expect from foodie writing. Nonetheless, it merited a reply.

In Monday's piece, Nathanael Johnson argues that "we should strive to do better by animals, but that doesn’t mean we should condemn ourselves for eating meat." We should treat vegetarianism "the way religious traditions treat virtues" - as something to strive for but not to condemn ourselves for failing. Interestingly, this proposal by philosopher Paul Thompson fails by the philosopher's own standard that we "should also be prepared to apply it to humans." Would we be okay treating cannibalism in this way? No, because we know that eating someone is such a bad, easily avoidable harm that committing it is reprehensible. If this is Jesus-level sacrifice, as the the pi…

Howie Lempel pointed out that my post yesterday described "today's economics" in overly broad strokes. There are indeed many economists, for example, comparing outcomes between persons. Anytime an economist argues for a policy on the basis of some averaging or aggregating metric is comparing outcomes across persons. Using the effect on GDP per capita to determine the value of a policy, for instance, implies that the gain from an additional dollar is equal regardless of who is gaining the extra dollar. Though Piketty and Saez's work on inequality is largely descriptive, it clearly implies that distribution matters. Similar things can be said for the work of organizations, like my employer, that study global poverty. Many scholars of public choice theory and welfare economics propose ways to evaluate outcomes across persons. So there is a more recent history of work with an eye toward a more robust conception of justice.

This weekend the Library of Economics and Liberty has a nice piece on why economics is often called the "dismal science." According to the post, the phrase originated not in a debate over economic growth, as is commonly believed, but in a debate over slavery. John Stuart Mill, one of economics's foundational thinkers, strongly supported emancipation because "economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus all entitled to liberty."

From today's New York Times Briefing:
President Obama visits the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution near Oklahoma City today, where he will talk about the need for more humane conditions in prisons.
As with the case of animal agriculture, it's easy to call for humane treatment, but we should really ask ourselves, "why are they locked up at all?" According to the Sentencing Project, nearly half a million of those locked up - about a quarter of the total incarcerated population - are locked up for drug offenses. Beyond incarceration, half of all drug arrests are for the possession of marijuana.
Among its many consequences, one result of this policy is a staggering number of missing black men.
Humane is better, but what we most need is freedom for people wrongly behind bars. And it bears saying that drug offenses are the low-hanging fruit. The American incarceration problem goes well deeper than that. More broadly, we deal with violent offenses with a view to re…

One of my friends commented that the rational thing to do is to select 6% - unless you happen to be that marginal student whose choice brings everyone down, you can only expect to gain by selecting 6%.

My immediate reaction was that, well no, that's the rational thing to do provided you are egoistic and only care about your own exam score. If you're a rational altruist, though, the rational thing to do may be to select 2%, since in the unlikely event that you are the marginal student, you threaten to lose points for everyone. Depending on the size of the class and the way you value each additional point on the exam, this could easily outweigh the slight chance of getting an extra 4% for yourself.

I am a PhD student in economics at Stanford University and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. I am interested in global priorities research—research on the most effective ways to do good with limited resources—and a Global Priorities Fellow with the Forethought Foundation. I am an advocate and a follower of the effective altruism movement (www.effective-altruism.com). I was previously a Senior Research Analyst at the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University's Buffett Institute, where I studied the implementation of evidence-based policies in education and criminal justice. I am also the chair of the Animal Advocacy Research Fund Oversight Committee, which distributes roughly $300,000 annually to fund research on effective advocacy for animals.
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zdgroff.